Hemingway vs Dos Passos

Will Cohu

12:01AM BST 13 Aug 2006

Will Cohu reviews The Breaking Point: Hemingway, Dos Passos and the Murder of José Robles by Stephen Koch.

John Dos Passos first met José Robles Pazos on a night train from Toledo to Madrid in 1916. "Dos" was "a gangling, myopic, American kid", the illegitimate son of a Wall Street lawyer and a romantic radical who would one day write the novels Manhattan Transfer, The 42nd Parallel and The Big Money, adventures in Modernism that for a time put him at the top of the tree.

"Pepe" Robles was also a Leftist with bourgeois baggage. The two boys hit it off. Pepe introduced Dos to Cervantes, El Greco and bullfighting, to the "gorgeously dressed corpse" of old Spain that Pepe and his friends intended - with due respect - to bury.

Later, Dos looked out for Pepe when he came to live in America. But in 1936, Spain was ruptured by civil war and Pepe returned to serve the Republican administration. One night, he was arrested, shot and subsequently denounced as a fascist spy. When Dos Passos began to poke around, he was tarred with the same brush. The worst thing was, the accusers were led by Ernest Hemingway, whom Dos Passos had counted a friend since the First World War.

The Breaking Point is a compelling tragedy of a soured friendship, set against a background of civil war, political intrigue and Spanish hotel suites reeking of booze and treachery. The strength of Stephen Koch's voice, his trenchant, sardonic and novelistic approach, his vivid pen-portraits of a starry cast - which includes an icily ambitious Martha Gellhorn stalking the ruins in furs - will put off purists of literary biography, but make for a kind of profound entertainment.

In this thrilling version of sinister events, psychology feeds off politics. Hem was always going to knife Dos. His creative process demanded sacrifices, of marriages, lovers, friendships - little deaths through which he could renew himself and stave off despair. In earlier days, Dos was the star author and Hemingway a mere journalist. But they prompted each other. Dos thought Hem "the first great American stylist"; Hem saw Dos as a "truth teller". On politics they differed. "Hemingway shrugged off not just radical politics, but all politics," writes Koch. "That sort of crap bored him."

Some time in the 1930s, the friendship faltered "and somehow, Spain was part of it". The Republic was declared in 1933. Dos became a passionate supporter but Hem was more interested in bullfighting. While Dos was signing petitions, Hem was machine-gunning sharks off Key West and trying out various love triangles for pain. Dos saw the bust of Hem mounted on his friend's driveway and burst out laughing. "Big mistake," notes Koch.

Hem was getting sick of Dos. His revenge was typically complex. After his initial successes, he had struggled to make sense of To Have and Have Not, a half-hearted attempt at something more fashionably radical, noting bitterly that "despite the noble example of Dos, when I write a novel it has to go from one thing to another". Ultimately, Dos appeared in the novel as Richard Gordon, "an unmanly blowhard, a political and artistic poseur, a cuckold, a masochist and a deadbeat". And a trivial writer.

"Hem's implication was nasty but shrewd," writes Koch. "That Dos Passos was sometimes a kind of tourist in his own vision." Hemingway's camp may think that Koch's portrayal of his sadism and misogyny veers on the clichéd, but he also promotes Hem's charm, his courage (however Dutch) and his literary status. For all his good intentions, Dos lacked Hemingway's gifts and it showed - as Edmund Wilson told him - in rubbish dialogue in which everyone seemed to have had a bad egg for breakfast. But Dos was popular. Hemingway begrudged him. Dos was going to get whacked.

As it happened, Stalin had decided the same thing. Dos, like others of the avant-garde, had served his purpose and was to be critically liquidated. (Koch, who has previously written about Stalin's seduction of Western intellectuals, enjoys a certain amount of wicked fun here, implicitly doubling up Hemingway and Stalin.)

Narrowly avoiding a comprehensive conspiracy theory of American culture, Koch dissects the plot by which Hemingway was brought into the fold. It wasn't so hard. Hem liked people who liked killing. Hemingway's play The Fifth Column, "an exceptionally nasty piece of work", offered obliging justifications for Stalinist murders. He was easily persuaded that his old friend was Hitler's stooge. By the spring of 1938, he was writing, boozed up, to Dos: "Honest Jack Passo'll knife you three times in the back for 15 cents and sing Giovinezza [a fascist anthem] for free."

He followed up with an article in which he scorned the "liberal attitude" shown by a friend who had defended a fascist spy whom Hem knew had been shot after "a long and careful trial".

The breaking point had been passed. A reversal of meaning had been accomplished. Hem was the model of the new Leftist hero, and Dos the epitome of compromise; all the dead anarchists were fascists and two plus two equalled five.

The betrayals of the civil war left Dos flat. He lost his politics and his writing dribbled away. For Hem it heralded a good time. In the midst of this rapid recalculation, among the affairs and booze and bullets, he found his spark and began writing For Whom the Bell Tolls. The bandwagon was rolling again. Spain was dead, and another masterpiece was on the way.